ORESTEIAN TRILOGY, THE

What is justice? How is it related to vengeance? Can justice be reconciled with the demands of religion, the violence of human feeling, the forces of Fate? These questions, which puzzled thoughtful Athenians in the decades after the battle of Marathon, provided the theme for Agamemnon, The Choephori and The Eumenides - those grim tragedies that make up the 'Oresteian Trilogy'. In these plays Aeschylus (525-c. 456 BC) takes as his subject the bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argos - a chain finally broken only by the intervention of the goddess Athene.